Turtle Island: Campaign Notes

Started my long-awaited pirate campaign! I don't know if I've mentioned it here, although I've definitely talked about it in conversations with some of y'all. The basic premise is that elves and dwarves employ extraterrestrial humans as privateers to settle land disputes over a fantasy pseudo-Caribbean; meanwhile, and more centrally to the campaign, orc slaves revolt to liberate themselves and establish a free republic. It's a pretty lazy setup—but it's both distinct from typical Euro-fantasy and more relatable to our various experiences. I can't say that being away from my family wasn't a factor!

We left off our first session by the crew taking an offer to raid a plantation in exchange for a ship and whatever loot they find there (specifically, barrels of rum for the Ugly Coyote Inn, which offered one of the pirate characters a rehearsal on the condition that she delivers rum to them—the others asked if they could just get paid instead, to which the owner said: "Yeah, that's like the normal thing to do."). I've visited historical plantations in Puerto Rico and in the American South, so I have a general idea of what they were like and how they operated. But a general idea isn't good enough for me, especially not in this setting which I want to explore from a realist angle.

I should clarify what I mean by "realist". I've been talking to myself about the difference between "realistic" and "realist". The former I associate with an encyclopedic, high-definition approach towards fiction that habitually avoids contrivances in narrative to seem more true to life (for someone's understanding of life). In contrast, the latter is one I think of being more thematic: exploring dynamics between people or institutions or things, even using metaphors and contrivances to animate those aspects of our real world. I don't know. I'm 70% sure the distinction comes from visual art, so someone can correct me if I'm super wrong, but I hope the point comes across anyway.

That's all to say I think as much as these experiences have been repeatedly ignored or antagonized, when it comes to D&D, the more interesting approach is to invert the lens through which we usually view them, and embrace their subjectivity as our own (even or especially to antagonize the predominant subject). I had done something similar for my FMC one-off—but the setting was not super relatable or interesting to me. This one is, though, so I want to inhabit it as fully as possible. That means combining my family's experiences and some historical readings with fantastical elements that animate them.

Fantasy Creole

Creole cultures are the realest cultures in the world. There's no pretense of them being (necessarily) tied to a particular place. You know, there's no blood-and-soil bullshit. It's all about peoples whose circumstances (geographical, historical, social) led them to synthesize and develop something new out of necessity. Obviously those circumstances were quite bad, but in hindsight we can celebrate the cultures and their products as expressions of common survival. There's a line from that Lin Manuel Miranda musical In The Heights, which is dramatic yet very reflective: "Our people survived slave ships. We survived Taíno genocide. We survived conquistadors and dictators." There's also Calle 13.

As the players begin to explore the game-world in greater depth, I run the risk of naïvely aping real-world culture to fill in the gaps of the setting. Besides being unimaginative, it's also dismissive. It doesn't contextualize or illustrate the historical dynamics at play; it just allows participants, including myself, to take their outcomes and products at face value. Our elves, for example, are not fantasy-Christian but have a religion which occupies the same historical niche as the Catholic Church (an institution to unify and mobilize disparate political subjects, functioning as empire). The contrast between the content of the real-life and fictional structures helps elucidate their common structure.

So, let's take food as an example, seeing as I'm hungry and you can't eat other material culture. Creole cuisine is very often described as a mix of indigenous, West African, and European food, but that's obviously not the whole story. Colonists ate the good stuff, the best local treats plus what they could import from their motherland. Conquered and enslaved peoples, however, had to make do with cheap rations and poor cuts of meat and what crops they could grow on provision grounds (local crops no one wanted, plus crops from their home no one wanted either). What you get, then, are indigenous and West African techniques of cooking applied to survival ingredients.

Fufu is the archetypal example of creole food. In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the Igbo characters cultivate yams which they prepare by mashing it into fufu. I remember asking my mom if that was where we got mofongo from and she was like, yeah, duh. You just mash cooked starch, and serve it with broth. It's not exactly rocket science, but the linguistic connections between different West African and Caribbean mash foods show demonstrate a continuity of technique if not also of ingredients. There's mofongo, foofoo, mangú, funche—and Cubans still just call theirs fufú! Sometimes it's made of yams, sometimes plantains like in mofongo, and sometimes even cornmeal. Soul food has obvious West African roots, and I wonder if mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes aren't also fufu by another name, though one article actually identifies cornbread with fufu. Leafy stews and rice/bean dishes are also pretty West African; worth mentioning, though, that we get barbecue from the Taíno (slaves just had less 'nice' meat to work with).

So, my goal needs to be to show similar techniques of food preparation using different and non-pretentious ingredients. Sometimes it's cheaper to import cornmeal or grow tubers than it is to cultivate other starches; other times, for lack of fresh water, you end up frying things instead of stewing them; other times, still, you end up needing to hunt your own small game instead of cooking even unwanted cuts of meat. It's those circumstantial differences that help contextualize them in the grander scheme of things.

Plantations

Something I think is somewhat understated is that slavery was the basis of industrial capitalism as we know it, and indeed the world-system still practices slavery via debt or sharecropping even if the workers are not chattel per se (although, they may still be; even we in the US still have forced labor in combination with private prisons). We know the triangular trade: Africa yields slaves as laborers, the peripheral New World yields materials, and the core world (northern US and Europe) yields manufactured goods. This is a sort of fetishistic model, though, in the Marxist sense. It's not just that these regions yielded those goods, but that these were complex social systems of production that interfaced with each other. Colonizers enslaved Africans; slaves grew cash crops; workers in the core manufactured goods from bloodstained materials.

What struck me was realizing that plantations—by definition, cash-crop farms relying on mass labor—were (and still are) industrial enterprises. Reading Marx and Lenin, you'd know that in Europe they had lots of trouble privatizing agriculture because most farmers were peasants with small land holdings. Only eventually would, as they say, the bigger peasants eat the smaller ones and thereby (1) concentrate capital to begin industrialization, (2) employ dispossessed peasants as a rural proletariat, and (3) merge with other national capitals to monopolize and even globalize. Plantations did not really have that problem because the colonizers came in, enslaved the population, and put them to fucking work specifically to grow crops for cash and not for use (especially for crops whose cultivation requires so much effort that they require mass labor). Lewis Mumford said that machines and technics are ultimately expressions and extensions of social organizations, so we should likewise read plantations as precursors of industrial labor. Apparently, Luchien Karsten argues that factories and railroad companies employed the same organizational methods as plantations, but that's just a Wikipedia citation.

I've taken some notes on the structure and content of plantations, for this session and very probably others in the future. There's nothing fun about them. They're not interesting. They're abhorrent. They're death factories. The life expectancy of slaves was somewhere from 20 to 29 years old. New slaves had to constantly be imported from Africa because slaves were regularly worked and tortured to death—notably, African slaves were imported because the supply of indigenous slave labor was initially extinguished in this way, contributing to their genocide within the first century of colonization. The fantasy of slave revolt has to contend with the horrors of slavery, but what does that mean? You cannot gloss over it. At the same time, you cannot risk indulging in it. I think this is the point at which fantastical elements need to intervene, in a very Freudian sense, to communicate the significance of horrors which are otherwise ineffable.

Maybe the campaign will need to slightly shift gears.

Play Materials

I thought I'd share these while I'm here! Everyone has the character sheet and setting handout, but not the rules document since (for now) I'd rather just wing it and let myself worry about it.